


Forever

by madlysanecatlady



Series: The Nice and Accurate Ineffable Husbands Compendium [13]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Fluff, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-05-07 10:19:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19207378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madlysanecatlady/pseuds/madlysanecatlady
Summary: Crowley is terrible with words. But maybe that doesn't matter.





	Forever

Crowley was absolute rubbish when it came to words. He tended to work best through action. He didn’t prefer to fuss about with words, or tenses, or adding _feelings_ to them. That was definitely more Aziraphale’s are of expertise – but of course, the angel was the reason he was even bothering with this nonsense to begin with.

He knew Aziraphale was absolutely in love with words. How else could anyone explain his absolute _obsession_ with musty old books? His face lit up whenever his eyes fell upon the leather binding of an old, usually battered book. The rarer the better. The only reason Crowley hadn’t become seethingly jealous of those old volumes was that the angel’s eyes also lit up like that when he looked at him. Which brought him back to his current conundrum.

It had been a few weeks since the Notpocalypse (he was rather proud of the fact that Aziraphale seemed to enjoy that term he’d coined) and Crowley was still struggling to put words to the absolute mess of emotions he had swirling around in his brain. And more importantly, in his heart and soul, if demons still had those things, of course. He knew at his core what he wanted: Aziraphale. More precisely, he wanted to have the angel by his side forever. He wanted quiet days, lazing around the bookshop, day trips to the countryside, outings to bakeries and hole-in-the-wall restaurants that would curl the angel’s toes with how good their food was. He wanted gentle touches, lingering glances, sweet kisses – the briefest touches of lips to lips, lips to hair, lips to nose, lips to anywhere really, he wasn’t picky. And yes, he wanted the lingering kisses, the ones that made their breathing race, their hearts beat out of time, their souls threaten to jump out of their skins and merge together into one. He wanted everything and anything all at once and one at a time slowly. He wanted them over and over, for the rest of Time.

Knowing that in every inch of his being was not The Issue. The Issue was he needed to tell Aziraphale that. Now, this is the point where one would logically just say “Crowley, just sit the angel down and babble it all out at him. He’ll get the point. You’ll get an answer.” But all Crowley could say to the one who would utter such idiocy is “shut it.” This was _Aziraphale_. He had lived through the writing of (and consequently the reading and re-reading and re-re-reading) of some of the most beloved, renowned and _epic_ romances in all of history. A mere babbling from a flustered and flushing demon would not do. No, this needed to be perfect. This needed to be poetic.

Enter, The Notebook. Not the film, no, Crowley had no patience for that absolute trash of a film. (That’s what he told himself, despite having watched and cried through it on several drunken occasions.) An actual honest-to-goodness paper notebook. Complete with pen – the nice, gel kind that wrote smoothly across the page. This was his testing ground. This was where he auditioned Words to use to convey how he felt to his angel. At first he had thought the idea was ridiculous, an exercise in futility, but as he filled more and more pages of Feelings and Words, Crowley started to see it as rather very helpful.

> _Angel, I love you. Marry me?_

That was the disastrous first attempt on page one. Crowley still rolled his eyes at himself when he opened The Notebook and made the mistake of letting it fall to the first page. How could he ever have thought _that_ would be enough to convince someone as perfect as Aziraphale to spend the rest of their largely-eternal-save-for-holy-water-or-hellfire lives together? What an idiot he was.

> _Aziraphale. You’re my angel. Not that you belong to me, you’re your own person of course, and I love and respect you and all that, but I just want you to know how much you mean to me. You’re my everything and I want to maybe one day be your everything too. What I’m saying is, I want to marry you, if you’ll have me. So will you? Marry me?_

Somehow his attempt on page eight was even more pathetic than the one on the first page. He had started to lose hope at around this point and had just started writing absolute nonsensical poetry about kissing near duck ponds and whether or not ducks have ears with which to hear them whisper sweet nothings to each other (he really had no idea where that had come from) and love and weddings. None of it was usable. None of it was fit to see the light of day, let alone this Notebook completely dedicated to his feelings about Aziraphale. Aziraphale was brightness. Aziraphale was order. This book was chaos. It was all over the place. He was Doomed. There was no way he could ever convey his feelings properly. But that was simply untenable. He could not sit idly around and not have the angel know. He _needed_ to find a way to tell him.

With a heavy sigh, Crowley resolved to give it another go. Even if he had to fill a hundred books like this one, he would find the way to tell Aziraphale everything he needed to hear. Everything Crowley felt for him, even the feelings that had no words to describe them. Ineffable, Aziraphale would call them. The idea made Crowley smiled. Perhaps he could use that as a starting point. Well, he would, if he could find The Notebook.

It was not in its usual spot in his jacket’s breast pocket. It was not anywhere in his office. He practically tore his sparse (aside from the plants, who received one _hell_ of a lashing at) flat apart searching for it to no avail. The Notebook simply wasn’t there. Which left only one place it could be: the bookshop.

The thought turned Crowley cold from head to toe. He couldn’t have the angel seeing it. He could definitely not have him _reading_ it. None of it was right. None of it held any of the weight it should. Most of it was barely coherent and next to illegible – particularly the parts covered in wine stains and what might possibly be frustrated tear marks. He would need to find it in the absolute mess of a bookshop before Aziraphale did. He refused to imagine what could happen if he didn’t.

The ride to SoHo was fast (speed limits were what you made of them, weren’t they?) but felt like an eternity to a panicking demon. A parking space right in front of the shop door was miraculously free, which he haphazardly parked the car in and leapt out, tossing the door open and rushing inside.

Aziraphale was there, most unusually, with what appeared to be a customer trying to _buy_ something. At least, that was Crowley’s assumption based on the Very Annoyed Look on the angel’s face. He looked up when Crowley burst in and smiled brightly for a moment, before quickly appearing to realise the stiffness and anxiety radiating up and down the demon’s spine.

‘Crowley, dear, you look upset,’ he frowned across the shop at him. ‘Is everything alright? What’s happened?’

‘Oh, you’ve got a customer,’ Crowley shook his head lamely. ‘I’m fine, angel. I’ll come back later.’

‘You’ll do no such thing, dear,’ Aziraphale rolled his eyes. ‘Please go into the office and have a seat. I’ll be with you very shortly. This lovely young lady and I just have some business to finish up.’

Well, he appeared quite pleased to see him, that was a good sign. And he appeared to be acting normally, which was doubly good. Crowley must have gotten here in time. He could still find The Notebook before Aziraphale did and he ruined everything. He hoped this customer took her sweet time in her business with his angel – he could use all the time he could get to figure out where he could have dropped it.

Time was very clearly something he did not need at all, Crowley realised when he entered Aziraphale’s office, eyes falling immediately on the familiar cheesy heart-print notebook where it sat neatly on the edge of the desk. He blanched. So Aziraphale _had_ seen it after all. He only hoped the angel hadn’t had time to open it yet. Swallowing down his nerves, he picked up The Notebook, opening it to the first page. When he saw neat green cursive next to his red scratchy block letters, he nearly dropped it in disbelief.

> _Yes! Of course I will marry you my dearest._

Crowley read and re-read the words there what must have been a thousand times before the soft sound of angelic footsteps stirred him from his staring stupor.

‘Turn to the last page, dear,’ Aziraphale said softly, coming up behind Crowley and surprising him by winding his arms around his neck, pressing his front flush (and _warm!_ the snake still inside him insistently pointed out) against his back. Crowley did what he was told, despite the short circuiting in his brain and found a rather longer message in Aziraphale’s neat cursive.

> _Crowley, my dearest,  
> _   
>  _You needn’t go to such trouble in finding what you think are the perfect words to encompass all love and devotion – none such words exist. Love, the kind we share, is ineffable. Regardless, your words are always perfect. They come from the heart, not the brain, and isn’t that what matters most?  
> _   
>  _I love you more than even the greatest of poets could put to words. I want to belong to you – in heart and soul, come Heaven or Hell. So yes, my lovely demon, I will marry you if that is your heart’s desire – just know that I am yours no matter what any social construct or occult force deems worthy to say.  
> _   
>  _Forever and always, my dear._

Crowley turned around, throwing his arms around his angel and burying his face into his neck, pressing his lips against whatever flesh he could find above the starchy shirt collar. ‘I love you,’ he mumbled against soft skin, both hearing and feeling the hum of contentment in Aziraphale’s throat. ‘I think I always have, angel. I know I always will. You’re my forever.’

‘And you mine, precious demon,’ Aziraphale sighed happily, turning slightly to kiss the underside of Crowley’s jaw. ‘I need you to know that. I don’t need grand gestures, or romantic poetry, or Perfect Words. I need _you_ , Crowley. You’re my everything, yes, my forever.’

Crowley had no answer to that but to pull back and kiss him, drinking in the taste of his angel – his forever. 


End file.
